The /etc/fstab file can be used to define how disk partitions, various other block devices, or remote filesystems should be mounted into the filesystem.

Each filesystem is described in a separate line. These definitions will be converted into systemd mount units dynamically at boot, and when the configuration of the system manager is reloaded. The default setup will automatically fsck and mount filesystems before starting services that need them to be mounted. For example, systemd automatically makes sure that remote filesystem mounts like NFS or Samba are only started after the network has been set up. Therefore, local and remote filesystem mounts specified in /etc/fstab should work out of the box. See man 5 systemd.mount for details.

The mount command will use fstab, if just one of either directory or device is given, to fill in the value for the other parameter. When doing so, mount options which are listed in fstab will also be used.

Field definitions

Each line in the /etc/fstab file contains the following fields separated by spaces or tabs:

file_systemdirtypeoptionsdumppass

file system

The partition or storage device to be mounted.

dir

The mountpoint where <file system> is mounted to.

type

The file system type of the partition or storage device to be mounted. Many different file systems are supported: ext2, ext3, ext4, btrfs, reiserfs, xfs, jfs, smbfs, iso9660, vfat, ntfs, swap and auto. The auto type lets the mount command guess what type of file system is used. This is useful for optical media (CD/DVD).

options

Mount options of the filesystem to be used. See the mount man page. Please note that some options are specific to filesystems; to discover them see below in the aforementioned mount man page.

dump

Used by the dump utility to decide when to make a backup. Dump checks the entry and uses the number to decide if a file system should be backed up. Possible entries are 0 and 1. If 0, dump will ignore the file system; if 1, dump will make a backup. Most users will not have dump installed, so they should put 0 for the dump entry.

pass

Used by fsck to decide which order filesystems are to be checked. Possible entries are 0, 1 and 2. The root file system should have the highest priority 1 (unless its type is btrfs, in which case this field should be 0) - all other file systems you want to have checked should have a 2. File systems with a value 0 will not be checked by the fsck utility.

Identifying filesystems

There are different ways to identify filesystems that will be mounted. /etc/fstab does support several methods: kernel name descriptor, label or UUID, and GPT labels and UUID for GPT disks. UUID must be privileged over kernel name descriptors and labels. See Persistent block device naming for more explanations. It is recommended to read that article first before continuing with this article.

In this section, we will describe how to mount filesystems using all the mount methods available via examples. The output of the commands lsblk -f and blkid used in the following examples are available in the article Persistent block device naming. If you have not read that article yet, please read it now.

Kernel name descriptors

Run lsblk -f to list the partitions and prefix the values in the NAME column with /dev/.

Tips and tricks

Automount with systemd

If you have a large /home partition, it might be better to allow services that do not depend on /home to start while /home is checked by fsck. This can be achieved by adding the following options to the /etc/fstab entry of your /home partition:

noauto,x-systemd.automount

This will fsck and mount /home when it is first accessed, and the kernel will buffer all file access to /home until it is ready.

Note: This will make your /home filesystem type autofs, which is ignored by mlocate by default. The speedup of automounting /home may not be more than a second or two, depending on your system, so this trick may not be worth it.

The same applies to remote filesystem mounts. If you want them to be mounted only upon access, you will need to use the noauto,x-systemd.automount parameters. In addition, you can use the x-systemd.device-timeout=# option to specify a timeout in case the network resource is not available.

Note: If you intend to use the exec flag with automount, you should remove the user flag for it to work properly as found in the course of a Fedora Bug Report

If you have encrypted filesystems with keyfiles, you can also add the noauto parameter to the corresponding entries in /etc/crypttab. systemd will then not open the encrypted device on boot, but instead wait until it is actually accessed and then automatically open it with the specified keyfile before mounting it. This might save a few seconds on boot if you are using an encrypted RAID device for example, because systemd does not have to wait for the device to become available. For example:

/etc/crypttab

data /dev/md0 /root/key noauto

You may also specify an idle timeout for a mount with the x-systemd.idle-timeout flag. For example:

noauto,x-systemd.automount,x-systemd.idle-timeout=1min

This will make systemd unmount the mount after it has been idle for 1 minute.

External devices

External devices that are to be mounted when present but ignored if absent may require the nofail option. This prevents errors being reported at boot. For example:

As of systemd 219, the nofail option is best combined with the x-systemd.device-timeout option. This is because the default device timeout is 90 seconds, so a disconnected external device with only nofail will make your boot take 90 seconds longer, unless you reconfigure the timeout as shown. Make sure not to set the timeout to 0, as this translates to infinite timeout.

If your external device requires another systemd unit to be loaded (for example the network for a network share) you can use x-systemd.requires=x combined with x-systemd.automountto postpone automounting until after the unit is available. For example:

Filepath spaces

Since spaces are used in fstab to delimit fields, if any field (PARTLABEL, LABEL or the mount point) contains spaces, these spaces must be replaced by escape characters \ followed by the 3 digit octal code 040:

atime options

Below atime options can impact drive performance.

The strictatime option updates the atime of the files every time they are accessed. This is more purposeful when Linux is used for servers; it does not have much value for desktop use. The drawback about the strictatime option is that even reading a file from the page cache (reading from memory instead of the drive) will still result in a write!

The noatime option fully disables writing file access times to the drive every time you read a file. This works well for almost all applications, except for a rare few like Mutt that needs such information. For mutt, you should only use the relatime option. The write time information to a file will continue to be updated anytime the file is written to with this option enabled.

The nodiratime option disables the writing of file access times only for directories while other files still get access times written.

relatime enables the writing of file access times only when the file is being modified (unlike noatime where the file access time will never be changed and will be older than the modification time). The best compromise might be the use this option since programs like Mutt will continue to work, but you will still have a performance boost as the files will not get access times updated unless they are modified. This option is used when the defaults keyword option, atime option (which means to use the kernel default, which is relatime; see man 8 mount and wikipedia:Stat (system call)#Solutions) or no options at all are specified in fstab for a given mount point.

The noatime and relatime options avoid writes to the file system when files are read but not modified, which results in better performance.

Writing to FAT32 as Normal User

Notes: The linked section assumes that the partition on USB storage uses FAT32 or NTFS filesystem, so we have two sections covering the same topic. Either merge everything here or in the linked section. (Discuss in Talk:Fstab#)

To write on a FAT32 partition, you must make a few changes to your /etc/fstab file.

/etc/fstab

/dev/sdxY /mnt/some_folder vfat user,rw,umask=000 0 0

The user flag means that any user (even non-root) can mount and unmount the partition /dev/sdX. rw gives read-write access;
umask option removes selected rights - for example umask=111 remove executable rights. The problem is that this entry removes executable rights from directories too, so we must correct it by dmask=000. See also Umask.

Without these options, all files will be executable. You can use the option showexec instead of the umask and dmask options, which shows all Windows executables (com, exe, bat) in executable colours.

For example, if your FAT32 partition is on /dev/sda9, and you wish to mount it to /mnt/fat32, then you would use:

/etc/fstab

/dev/sda9 /mnt/fat32 vfat user,rw,umask=111,dmask=000 0 0

Remounting the root partition

If for some reason the root partition has been improperly mounted read only, remount the root partition with read-write access with the following command:

# mount -o remount,rw /

bind mounts

Note: Binding a directory to a different location is not recognised by almost any program, so for instance careless commands like rm -r * will also erase any content from the original location. So softlinks should be the preferable way in most cases. If you need permission to a directory on a Btrfs and softlinks are not sufficient its subvolumes faciliate extended capabilities like mount options compared to bind mounting

Sometimes programs or users cannot access one specific directory due to insufficient permissions. One feasable possibility to give the program access to this directory is bind mounting it to a location the program can access. If a program has permission to access directory bar but not to directory foo, under some circumstances the access can be granted without any permission hassle by adding an entry to /etc/fstab: